Wednesday, February 11, 2015

My Adaptation Theory can Lick Your Adaptation Theory

Many years ago,
when I was doing my doctoral research, I encountered a book by Renaissance
scholar Richard Levin, New Readings vs.
Old Plays (1979), which wittily chronicled the ways in which critics of
different generations and persuasions attacked their predecessors before
putting forward new ‘radical’ interpretations of their own. He described this process as one in which “my
theory can lick your theory”; a childlike statement that clearly indicates a
desire on the critic’s part to set forth “better” ideas, compared to those who
have written in the past.

After a long
career spent writing about various topics, it’s intriguing for me to be incorporated
into that rhetorical strategy. I read a
conference abstract – to be presented in a session at the Popular Culture
Association Conference in Albuquerque on Friday 13 February (I am also
scheduled to present in the same session, should American Airlines actually get
me there!) – that will investigate whether those who have put forward models of
adaptation studies in the humanities (like myself, or Tom Leitch), have taken
into account the “rekindling of emergence theory in scientific circles.”

Inevitably we
are accused of superficiality in our perspectives; we have apparently made
“quick inferences between the paradigm of natural selection and the
‘determination’ of narrative structures and tropes in adapted works.” We need to update our notions of contemporary
scientific adaptation theory, especially if we intend to place these theories
in discourse with cultural objects whose meanings are still emerging in popular
culture. So there you are.

The author of
this abstract, Jillian St. Jacques, is obviously keen to put forward her point
of view, and I shall look forward to discussing it (and writing about it in a
future blog post). At present, however,
I would like to make one or two points about her abstract that might help to
clarify my use of Darwin in adaptation theory.

I am certainly
interested in Darwin, but I am not especially concerned with his paradigm of
natural selection. That principle is
both culture-specific and subject to various socio-cultural forces as well as
individual choice. Darwin wrote in more
general terms about “adaptation,” understood in this context as the process of
accommodating oneself to new surroundings.
In this he prefigured the views of psychologists such as Jean Piaget.

I am not
especially concerned with the relationship between Darwin and the
“determination of narrative structures and tropes in adapted works.” My principal interest is in the way
individuals adapt to the world around them, and translate that process of
adaptation into texts of various kinds – screenplays, essays, blog posts, or
whatever. Through this process of
writing we can learn something about the social, cultural and psychological
forces that shape the way they write.

I am a great
believer in authorial intention. If we
consider adaptation as a process involving psychological as well as other forms
of transformation, then we cannot help but take individual viewpoints into
consideration. A cinematic text, or a
literary text, evolves out of collaborations between different individual
viewpoints – the writer, director, editor, publisher, as well as the
reader. Studying the interaction between
these viewpoints helps us understand how texts are adapted and re-adapted, just
like the individual who produce these adaptations.

I do not believe
that there is any distinction between “emergent” and “accepted” meanings
attached to any cultural artifact. If we
accept that adaptation is an ongoing process, then meanings are perpetually
shifting; to use that binary opposition implies a reluctance to accept the existence
of plurality and diversity.

Likewise I make
no distinction between adaptation in the arts or science. True transdisciplinarity implies a
willingness to negotiate; to take into account recent writings on emergence
theory and use them to formulate a more polysemic model of adaptation,
encompassing the humanities, science, psychology, the social sciences, or
whatever. On the other hand I would
argue that St. Jacques has to update her notions of how other theorists have
considered adaptation using Darwin as their model.

The only person
who has made “quick inferences” is St. Jacques herself, who in her desire to
show that her theories can lick those of other theorists, has put forward a
viewpoint that can be readily challenged.

1 comment:

When I was studying Translation Theory for my PhD on Verne literary translation from French into ENglish, one article that really caught my interest was by Victor Longa on non-linear dynamics in translation, and the idea of complex emergence, chaos, randomness, etc, and how these ideas could be applied to the translation process. Reading this blog post suddenly brought Longa to mind when I noted your references to 'emergence'. Am hungry to get properly back into the 'research saddle'! If only teaching and other commitments didn't eat into so much time, as I really want to publish a monograph on literary adaptations of Verne, for which most of the empirical investigation has been long carried out and written up; what now remains, more crucially, to be done, is for me to study the adaptation literature, and clearly Raw's work will be a central source over coming months/years. Am grateful for your contact on Twitter recently and for thus helping me discover your body of work. Kieran.